Antique fruit jar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Glass canning jars, also known as fruit jars or Mason jars (named after its inventor John L. Mason, not after freemasonry or the craft of a stonemason) have been around since the early 1850s and today are eagerly sought after by collectors. There is a section on eBay devoted to the sale of antique fruit jars, some of which have sold for as high as $30,000.
The earliest glass jars were called wax sealers because they used sealing wax, which was poured into a channel around the lip which held on a tin lid. This process was complicated and error-prone, but was largely the only one available for a long time, and widely used even into the early 1900s.
By far, though, the most popular form of seal was the screw-on zinc cap, the precursor to today's screw-on lids. The earliest successful application of this was discovered by Mason and patented on November 30, 1858, a date that is embedded in collectors' collective subconscious because it is embossed on thousands of jars. Jars with "Patent Nov 30th 1858" were made in many shapes, sizes and colors well into the 1900s. They range in price from a few dollars to many thousands of dollars. Since they were made in such quantity and used for such long periods, many of them have survived to the present day, and the vast majority of them are sold for less than $10 despite often being more than 100 years old. Canners often use a two-piece lid consisting of a center portion used to seal the jar and a sealing ring, or figgler, to hold the center portion in place during sealing.
Another popular closure is known to collectors as the lightning closure, named after the first jar to use it, which was embossed with "Lightning" on the side. More commonly, this is often known as a "bail" closure and consists of a metal wire that leverages a glass lid down when pressed against the side of the jar.
The heyday for jars was probably 1860-1900, when an explosion of patents for various closures were issued, ranging from the effective to the absurd. The more absurd closures were quickly abandoned and often fetch high prices in today's market.
Often, though, what jar collectors today most often look for is great color in a jar, and there are reproduction jars in "fantasy" colors or jars which have been irradiated to bring out colors not original to the jar. About 99% of all jars are in some shade of aqua or clear so these are not normally sought-after colors (although there are a few exceptions). More rarely, jars will turn up in amber and occasionally in darker shades of green. Rarer still are cobalt blues, blacks and milk glass jars, and there is no known existence of any deep red antique jar. However, rare jars still pop up out of the woodwork. A collector recently acquired a cobalt blue jar that had been the subject of rumors for a long time but never seen before.
